August 28, 2008

Well worth a look if you can, touching but not sentimental. And as befits the man, a gloriously rich and epic tale.

It also shows a more human side to TV's Mr Cynical. The reality of another person's death works on all of us very differently from the statistical fact of the same - just as Stalin is supposed to have observed - because it's people and not stuff that we're wired for.

So who does Jerry now think he is?

"I'm a link in the chain of an old wonderful family. I'm blessed"

"A link in the chain" not an individual. Just like a good social animal does...

Alex has done some more great stuff on how jargon spreads through academic populations (reported today in the THE)

I suspect his inner physicist might be responsible for the cute dig at social scientists and how they seem to be just copying each other's words randomly...

"I have come to feel that in the social sciences you get bodies of
theory that I suspect actually started from a buzzword. A lot of those
words don't have concrete meaning,"

Meanwhile, just for you, dear Reader, he's done the above chart which seems to suggest that "Branding"'s spread through business and economics academe has 1. grown via the s-curve pattern typical of random copying and 2. it may be peaking in popularity (thank the Lord, you're saying...)

Now, my more evil twin has just asked whether Alex's comment also applies to business journal contributors...and we other users of the B-word?

I've heard lots of odd distortions of the basic idea at the heart of James' bestseller recently - mostly, of the "you see, crowds are stupid after all..." variety

Most of these ignore the fact that one of the main points that the book makes is that circumstances are important: it's not just any old bunch of folk, organised any which way that makes for collective wisdom

Just as Clay and Charlie's mass collaboration stuff has certain conditions necessary for success, so does the kind of collective guesswork that James used to first articulate what we mean by the wisdom of crowds. So please no more stupid "the crowd is stupid" comments...

Which brings me on to the graph above. The Iowa Electronic Markets (which James refers to) harness the WoC with some predictive success - for the past 4 or 5 presidential elections they've been closer to the final outcome on 3 out of 4 days than the polls...

PS I've told the story before about how Muiry won money in 2004 by following the IEM's predictions which we'd been discussing and I - fool that I am - refused to believe the data and ended up with nowt.

August 26, 2008

Read Mark Borkowski's very entertaining history of PR, the Fame Formula, while I was on hols. Brilliant (particularly the first half)

Some fantastic (and quite scurrilous tales) about the early days of Showmen like Barnum and the Fixers of the Hollywood Golden Years and - for me at least - a welcome counterblast to the widespread idea of the slick considered communications manipulator that dominates our thinking about marketing generally.

Particularly in the light of the renewed interest in stunts, branded content and participative marketing techniques: we can all learn a heap from Barnum and his Jumbo-sized pranks and his glee in creating experiences, branded content and marketing activity that does all that we ask ours to do. But mostly it's his glee that's clear....

Why don't we all just get over ourselves - accept this side of our game - and stop acting like social workers or brain surgeons - to paraphrase that fine band, We Are Not Scientists - and embrace our inner PTB.

Good on, ya Mark for bringing these guys back to our attention and sticking a drawing-pin under our over serious a*****.

Nice little factoid in this Cory post about how much we want to believe the VTech murders are the result of (boo hiss!) violent gaming:'There’s this broad consensus that the Virginia Tech murders had
something to do with violent video games. When you actually read the
coroner’s inquest report, video games are mentioned twice. The first is
his mother saying he never wanted to play those video games. The second
is his roommate saying, “We always thought he was weird because he
never wanted to play video games.” Yet it’s still a truism that violent
video games must be responsible for Virginia Tech'

Just like we'd prefer to believe the Big Man Theory of History (how history is shaped by important/heroic individuals) and the Big Event Theory of Psychopathology and Personality (how our personality and behavioural traits today are shaped by important things that happened to us in the past), we're also all to ready to rush off, sniffing out a ridiculously simplistic cause to make sense of stuff that happens to us (particularly if it's something or someone we've already decided we don't like or trust).

August 09, 2008

I've written before (for example here) about how unhelpful the Brand Idea has become.

Actually, I think my point was that it had become too useful: because there's no agreed definition, you can use "Brand" to mean anything thing you want, to prescribe and justify what you want to do or proscribe and scorn what you don't want to do.

It's a shorthand that signals lazy thinking or worse.

A way of both obfuscating stuff and at the same time avoiding tough thinking about how stuff really works

So when this morning's Guardian Weekend mag trails an interview with John Leslie, minor TV celeb with a string of alleged sexual assault (and equally alleged drug abuse history) with the words

'I failed to protect the brand ... moi'

...you know it's time to stop

So I'm going to propose an amnesty.

If - from today - you stop using the B-word, we won't say any more about it. Your previous will be wiped from the record.

August 08, 2008

Not only does he big up Dirk Helbing's work on self-organising traffic systems (which HERD reades will know all to well), but he also deals with Dirk's applications of the same stuff to industrial process design (for GM as it happens).

As I read the piece this morning, I had a strong sense of the "uncanny": a discomfort with the idea of organisations without human-based structure- without someone in control.

I think an instinctive resistance to this kind of thing is widespread - say of a traffic control system without a central (human-led) control room or a factory without anyone in charge - and this serves to underline how peculiarly unsuited our minds seem to be to living with complexity. As Mark puts it,

"we can't trust our intuition when it comes to the super-complex systems we depend on"

We'd much prefer things to be other than they are: to be ordered and manageble and predictable.

Mark again:

"WE HUMANS prefer the tidy to the untidy, the ordered to the disordered.
We like pristine geometrical regularity, and eschew what is erratic and
irregular. We want predictability and, more than anything, we want
control"'

And much of management science - of the professionalisation of our working lives - plays to just this preference. And perpetuates our illusions.

So next time you sense you yourself or somebody around you (a client or colleague) seeking a bit of control, understand that what you're witnessing is a resistance to complexity.

August 06, 2008

Maybe it's just jealousy - a bit of me envies the boys' success, too. I wish I was creating meaning like this for so many folk.

But this weekend's Village Fete - their annual gathering of Innocent customers, fans and staff - in London's Regent Park was another triumph. And - like the product testing technique (above) which echoes their original "shall we quit our jobs?" challenge - a chance to reconnect with the character and purpose of Innocent.

Lots of fun, families, food (much better than at the Hop Farm - grrrrr) and plenty of familiar faces.

And despite the fact that the rain spells seemed to be useless, it felt like a really sunny day.